All quiet on the western front

Art and I were in Los Angeles for a few days last week. No, we weren’t auditioning for roles in a new “Dumb and Dumber” movie. We were there to see what’s happening in the land of milk and honey.

Los Angeles has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks. Masked federal agents looking for undocumented immigrants have been grabbing people — even American citizens — off the street, leading to protests by people who think the federal agents are ignoring the constitutional rights of citizens and non-citizens alike.

We were led to believe by President Donald Trump and some slanted news reports that LA was in chaos, a war zone so chaotic that Trump was forced to send in 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines to restore order.

We were in several areas of sprawling LA over three days and we saw no hint of trouble. Life in LA was going on as normal.

The only chaos we witnessed was on the notorious freeways of Southern California, where you waste half your life in traffic jams, hoping reckless drivers won’t take out your car. I have driven in New York City, Chicago and Atlanta, and they can’t compare to the insanity of LA freeways.

Los Angeles is an exciting, wonderful city with beautiful oceanside vistas, but driving an automobile there is crazy. The problem is, there’s no effective system of public transportation, so a car is essential to living in this sprawling community, encompassing some 10 million souls in the metropolitan area.

But those 4,000 troops weren’t anywhere near the chaos on the 405 freeway. No, they were all confined to a couple blocks downtown so Trump could look tough and decisive on Fox News in a crisis of his own making.

For millions of Angelenos, life went on as usual in defiance of this manufactured crisis. We didn’t hear a word about it from the waitresses and customers of the small cafes where we ate. No protesters marched on the streets of Torrance, home to many nationalities. No military convoys of tanks rolled down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was all quiet on the western front. All the noise was coming from DC, 3,000 miles away.

Don’t believe what you see on Fox News and don’t believe what Trump tells you. The leaders of California and Los Angeles have everything under control by themselves. The LA Police were quite capable of handling such protests. Interference by the feds only made it worse. The Angelenos I talked to were unanimous in support of their Governor Newsom over the dictates of President Trump.

God bless America on this Fourth of July weekend.

MORE PROOF that Storm Lake is the center of the universe.

When we checked into our hotel in LA, the desk clerk asked where we were from. “Storm Lake, Iowa,” we replied. “I know about Storm Lake,” she replied. “My brother works at Tyson there.”